Obama pursues guns, public looks elsewhere....
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows public sentiment ranking gun control fifth in priority as to how best to deal with gun violence.
Here are the public's rankings, as to what to focus on:
Parenting - 83%
Mental Illness - 82%
News Coverage - 67%
Hollywood - 62%
Gun Control - 59%
Public support for gun control peaked in 1990, at 78 percent. This coincided with the first uptick in mass shootings, which began in 1989. But it is well before 1999's Columbine & the big surge of mass killings in the early-'2000s.
All this is astonishing given the full court press mainstream media has put on gun control, with far less discussion of other issues.
One note of pessimism: in the most fragmented, vulnerable families (at all income levels), is where the highest likelihood is of finding impressionable young males who might act out film or video-game violence. These families could well be under-sampled in these kinds of polls.
Bottom Line. Consume media reporting with large grains of salt. This is one area where public sentiment comports with what common sense would suggest. A major fight over restrictive gun legislation may backfire on the president & his political allies. But it remains dubious that the public will penalize Hollywood for its perceived sins.
Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Conservative Politics
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